Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period(Continuum Literary Studies)

This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction, Adrian Grafe (Paris IV, Sorbonne, France) 1.Gerard Manley Hopkins as religious conduit in Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir, Catherine Phillips (Cambridge University) 2. From the Beauty of religion to the religion of beauty: Catholicism and aestheticism in fin-de-siècle poetry, Claire Masurel-Murray (Paris III, France) 3. The heart's censer: Liturgy, poetry and the Catholic devotional revolution, Maureen Moran (Brunel University) 4. Hymns in a man's life: The Congregational chapel and D.H. Lawrence's early poetry, Andrew Harrison (University of Darmstadt) 5. Slouching towards Bethlehem: Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Apocalypse, David Rudrum (London Metropolitan University) 6.'The unattended moment': Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Eliot's Four Quartets, David Summers (Capital University, Ohio) 7. 'If/Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead': forgiveness and the body in Auden's post-conversion poems, Kathleen Bell (De Montfort University) 8. Kathleen Raine: Song of the living soul, Annick Johnson (Artois University) 9.The sacrificial victim in David Jones's In Parenthesis, Roland Bouyssou (Toulouse Mirail University, France) 10.'For the failure of language there is no redress': R.S. Thomas, poetry and prayer, Daniel Szabo (Paris 7 University, France) 11. The metaphysical joke: church going with Philip Larkin, Andrew McKeown (University of Poitiers, France) 12. 'Metamorphic power': Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Taylor Merriman (Boston University) 13. Simone Weil among the poets, Adrian Grafe (Paris IV, Sorbonne, France) 14. Christian poetry and 'now', Michael Edwards (Collège de France, Paris) Index

About the Author :
Adrian Grafe is Professor of English at Université d'Artois, France. He has published widely on the connections between popular music and literature and written for TLS, Essays in Criticism and The Spectator. He co-edited and contributed to 21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely (Bloomsbury, 2021). His novel The Ravens of Vienna was published in 2022.

Review :
Mention -Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2008 "Claire Mansurel Murray gives a clear-sighted, historicist analysis of the Catholic element in the Arsthetic movement... As so often, Auden makes up his own rules, and somehow gets away with it... Emily Taylor Merriman respectfully parallels the Pauline vocations of Hopkins and Hill..." James Booth, MLR, 104.3, 2009